The following post comes courtesy of the sometimes inappropriately funny and always rather good-looking @liceri. I didn’t have to edit this at all, which is awesome, because I’m lazy.

Enjoy.

Annik

Canadian people are insane

My parents are Canadian and mental. From this, I assume that all Canadians are insane. I’m Canadian too but I’ve lived in Australia since I was 3 so it doesn’t really count. As they age, they become less and less guarded about the things they say in front of me (as far as they’re concerned, I’m too old to be emotionally affected by them), and think less and less before they speak because they think I don’t listen anymore. To outsiders, my mum is quiet, reserved, dignified and conservative. She doesn’t swear. She’s never lewd or crude. She’s lovely and cuddly and a pure delight; a true lady. However, in private (and after fair amounts of alcohol), she’s often the opposite.

As for my dad, well, he’s quiet – but he’s measured and thinks before he speaks.

Together, they’re unstoppable.

She’s a mathematical genius

Me: [sings something about ballsacks]
Mum: “Hey! You’re 24. I thought you grew out of that stuff!”
Me: “I grew INTO that stuff, not out of it.”
Mum: [after a long pause] “Wow! You’re going to be 25 soon!”
Me: [laughs hysterically]
Dad: [laughs hysterically]

After seeing an advertisement about bushfires

Mum: [To my dad] “If there’s a fire here, I’m going to take the dog, run straight to the beach and stay in the water. [long pause] What are you going to do?”

Discussing the new Australian Idol judge

Mum: “Well, of course he’s better than that fat dickhead, but he’s also heaps better than that other idiot, whats-his-name, Four-Door Holden or whatever…”

She saw me playing with my iPhone

Mum: “Who are you twatting?”

After I shouted “I have a headache” to no-one in particular

Mum: “SHUT UP!”

After being asked what our (French-inspired) dessert was

Mum: “The menu says ‘apple and lavender tarts, with dulche de leche’, which means ‘I haven’t the foggiest’.”

She saw a T-Shirt with the letter ‘W’ and an anchor (implying ‘wanker’)

Mum: “I don’t get it. Only women allowed on the boat?”

Regarding sperm donation

Mum: “I don’t get it. Why go through all the hassle of buying sperm, all the legalities, all the money spent, when you could just go to a bar, pick up, have sex with anyone and in five minutes it would be done for free?”

On the female anatomy

Mum: “So here in Australia ‘fanny’ doesn’t mean bum, it’s the front bit, right? So, what do you mean by ‘beef curtains’? I don’t get…” [watches me mime parting curtains] “Oh my goodness! Ewwww!”

On Situs Inversis (congenital condition in which the major organs are reversed or mirrored)

[Recieved via Email]

“That’s unbelievable! Guess it could be worse if your body parts were reversed (top to bottom) then your nose would constantly run and your feet would smell……….Anyway, I’m making shepherds pie for dinner. xox”

After being asked to rate a film out of five stars

Mum: “Oh, nine-and-a-half, easily!”

After watching Seven Pounds (film about organ donation)

Mum: “When I go, go ahead and give all my bits away. As if I’m going to even notice – I’ll be dead!”

While reading the morning paper

Mum: “I mean, imagine if you were the parent of the girl who bullied her online, driving her to suicide. How would you feel? It’s just so – OOH! POTATO AND LEEK PIE!”

On David Koch from Sunrise

Dad: “Did you know he used to be a finance reporter?”
Mum: “Did YOU know he’s a total KNOB JOCKEY!?!?”

On abstinence

Mum: “I don’t think I’m going to drink.” [pause] “I’ll just have a glass of Rosé instead.”

They were discussing wacky party themes

Dad: “What about a party with NO ALCOHOL?”[flails arms dramatically]

Mum: [death stare]

Re: their Christmas Eve party

Mum: “We don’t really need plates – it’s all fingering food.”

Dad: [throwing arms up triumphantly] “Excellent!”

On seeing my low-cut dress

Mum: “Are you allowed to have bosoms like that at work?”

Me: “Well, they’re not really removable.”

Upon entering the living room while I’m watching the Sixth Sense with a friend who’s never seen it before

Mum: “Isn’t it amazing that he’s actually DEAD the whole time?!”

What you are about to read is a very special guest post by William Raleigh, interim webmaster for http://www.timallenzone.org

Bill first came into my life when he commented on my previous post regarding Tim Allen. Since then I have been inspired by Bill’s dedication and heart-felt contributions to the Tim Allen cause. I think you will all agree that Bill is a pioneer, nay, an evangelist, and a man worthy of your respect, attention and admiration.

Over to you, Bill.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The year was 1997. There were a lot of drugs. A lot of ecstasy tablets… and a lot of entertainment.

In 1997, the motion picture For Richer or Poorer was storming into theaters. The English Patient was winning Best Picture. And Tim Allen was winning the People’s Choice Award for Best Male Television Performer.  Even more importantly maybe, Tim Allen was winning the hearts of millions.

But as much as it pains me to say it, this is not a post about Tim Allen. In fact it’s not even about my love of Tim Allen.  I could go on and on about my connection to Tim. About the fact that, as an orphan child, I truly looked up to Tim and Jill as my “tv parents.”  But I think, on some level, that’s something we all do with Tim Allen.  There’s something so deeply unique, yet commonplace about the man, that we can’t help but subjectify the experience, the ecstasy, that only a performer of Tim’s caliber can induce. But as deeply as it hurts, I know that Tim Allen is not someone who we can take in our arms and never let go. He was meant to be shared with the world. I will always treasure the moments of solitude I’ve had, psychic connections you could say, with Mr. Allen. But I fear that expounding on the subject may only serve to mitigate your own experiences, dear reader. And if there’s one thing I don’t want to do, it’s soil your personal connection with Tim Allen.

So instead, this post is about my lifelong journey, my dharma, of spreading Tim’s Warmth with all who care to bask and revel in it.

Naturally, when Annik asked me to do a guest post on her blog, my first thought (as it usually is) was- How can I use this to help Tim Allen?  Recently my friend, and Timallenzone.org co-founder, Andrew Kane, said to me:  ”You’ve done enough for Tim Allen, Bill. Isn’t it time you got the spotlight for a little bit?”

And maybe it is.  See, in 1997, a small group (two, to be exact) of avid fans got together with one goal– to utilize the World Wide Web in a way that had only been fantasized about before– as an entertainment mecca. An amalgamation of news, media, and fanboy love. Since then, a lot of people have taken timallenzone.org’s lead, and such websites have become common place. But at the time, everyone thought they were crazy.

Benjamin Smith and Andrew Kane pooled their resources, and launched a website on the now defunct Geocities (rip). The site was a tribute to the greatest entertainer of all time– and, as history has proven, one of the most timeless icons of the last few generations– Tim Allen.

I was still a relative child at the time. And, while I watched Home Improvement religiously, and while my heart swelled with love and pride for the Tool Man, I didn’t even know what it meant to be a true fan. Not until Ben and Andrew found me, and set me free.

In 2003, I was working at an apple orchard in Vermont. But even there, on those peaceful plains strewn with sun-ripe fruit, I found myself magnetically attracted to my computer. You see, by then, Home improvement was off the air. There were no megaplexes nearby, and thus no way for me to see the latest Tim Allen blockbuster. The internet was my only true connection to my hero, Tim Allen. I moderated a lot of messageboards, I spent a lot of time in chat rooms. And yes, unfortunately, I did a lot of cocaine powder. (Funnily, that addiction, and my subsequent recovery, only made me feel more connected to Tim. Tim’s been there. He’s fallen from great heights, and lifted himself back up again. As Tim did, so did I.) My cocaine-fueled scouring of Tim Allen internet sites eventually led me to Andrew and Ben’s magnificient, “Unofficial Tim Allen Fan Zone.”

Two years and several rehabs later, I became the interim webmaster for Tim Allen Zone.org. A dream come true, to say the least.

What we lack in content, we more than make up for in heart. We’ve received critical feedback about our spotty news feed (which I should probably update) as well as our lack of any functioning message board. But message board or not, there’s no denying that Timallenzone.org is a community. A real community.

And I guess what I’m asking you is to become a part of that community.  We’re adding new stuff all the time. We recently added a Fan Art/Fan Fiction section, which I urge you to check out. There’s some great stuff there. Also, by teaming up with the folks at Beards Encouraged, we’ve managed to bring our little-website-that-could into the 21st century. We now feature original Youtube tributes,  a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter Feed… even our own blog. But no matter how high-tech we get, no matter how high our page-counter soars, we’ll never forget who we are, where we came from, or why we’re here.

We’re here for one man who taught us all how to laugh and love. We’re here because of Tim Allen. Remember that. I know I will.

With love,

Bill Raleigh

Most people don’t really think about Tim Allen very much. I probably think about Tim Allen once every three years, unless I see his picture somewhere, and then I think about him for roughly four seconds before I get bored and stop. But those four seconds are filled with a vague yet certain sense of hate. And all over the world, people of all shapes and sizes, colours and creeds, religions and other silly things, all share one thing in common: we hate Tim Allen.

The average punter doesn’t hate Tim Allen very strongly, because it’s not a cause worthy of too much emotion. But we do possess a mild collective distaste for the Tool Time man. A slight wrinkle of the nose upon hearing his name. An immediate reach for the remote control. An eye roll. A head shake. A twist of the monocle and a shot of brandy. And a pinch on the bum.

So why exactly do we hate Tim Allen? Nobody knows for sure, but I have a few ideas.

The first question we should ask ourselves is this: what’s to like about Tim Allen?

And, of course, the answer is “nothing.”

The second question is: would you accept a lift home with this man?

Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical.

I recently went to a Tim Allen support group meeting and the following are just a few of the notes I made. These are real stories, from real people.*

Tim Allen broke into my house, stole a waffle iron and left obscene polaroids on my pillow.

Tim Allen took me out for a nice dinner once, and then got what was later described as ‘mildly rapey’.

I once had to watch The Santa Clause as a child. I cannot say anymore on the subject; the rest is repressed.

Tim Allen tried to pickpocket me while I was on holidays in Thailand, but he was clumsy with Mekhong whiskey & easily foiled.

Who wedged a red crayon between his buttocks and ‘autographed’ my house? Tim Allen did.

Tim Allen attempted to have an orgy with my dogs but I managed to beat him off with a spatula.

Tim Allen is responsible for the life I’ve led; the tears I’ve cried, the blood I’ve spilt.

Tim Allen borrowed my car for the weekend and returned it with a dead hooker in the trunk.

Hello! I am Tim Allen and everybody hates me.**

Now I’m not a biased person, and I want to deliver balanced views on this site, so I spoke to a well-known movie critic to get his thoughts on Tim Allen. This is what he said:

“Tim Allen is a man’s man man’s man. I’ll never forget the first time I met him; I’d fallen down a hill and broken my leg, and he carried me four miles to hospital, telling me hilarious jokes and reminding me why we let him into our lives (and hearts!) as Tim “The Tool-Man” Taylor.

I think that says it all, really.

When I was in primary school, we were visited once a year by the Life Education Australia van. This was a caravan manned by chirpy women who used a giraffe puppet (Healthy Harold) and a nude mannequin (Tammy) to educate third graders on drugs and general health. I didn’t care much for Harold, but I was fascinated by Tammy and her womanly figure, which I would never develop. Her plastic skin had been shaven away on one side, exposing her plastic internal organs. I wanted to reach out and stroke her plastic liver, then tweak her plastic nipple. I was shy though.

Healthy Harold taught us about the food pyramid and advised us to exercise regularly. He then launched into an anti-drug tirade and touched on the dangers of peer pressure as well as the legal and socio-economic factors involved with drug abuse and their long-term effects on society. I spent these lessons staring at the caravan ceiling, which was covered in tiny fake stars, and thinking about my silk worms, but the message was so strong, it seeped completely into my eight year old brain anyway. If anyone had offered me a cigarette, I would have urinated on their entire packet and rang the police immediately. If thirty of my classmates had stood in a circle and chanted “CHUG, CHUG, CHUG,” I would have tipped my bottle of beer down the nearest drain and raised my face to the sky, arms outstretched, before calling out the twelve steps and giving glory to God. I was completely staunch in my resolve: I would never drink or smoke. I would certainly never take drugs. I would be healthy. I would be happy. I would be like Harold.

Four years later, my great-grandmother died. She was ninety-seven years old, and had been in a nursing home for six months. I remembered the day she was put into the nursing home, because my father was very tense and simply told me, “She fell over.” But through eavesdropping on my mother’s phone conversations, I was able to piece together all the details: Nan had gotten out of bed during the night to get a glass of water, then she had fallen over on her way back from the kitchen, breaking her hip and smashing her head against the floor, knocking herself out. Unable to get back up after she regained consciousness, she simply remained on the floor and waited for somebody to find her. By the time my grandfather arrived in the morning to take her to church, she had ripped up half the carpet in her living room in an attempt to keep herself warm throughout the night. She had torn up her hands doing this, and managed to cut her arms on broken glass. She had also shat herself and was crying with embarrassment.

This single agonising, undignified event completely horrified me. “Why couldn’t she get back up again?” I asked my mother, interrupting her phone call.

“She’s just too old,” Mum explained, “The body starts to give up and stop working after a while.”

This distressed me deeply. The idea that I could one day find myself unable to walk or wipe my own arse was the most depressing thing I had ever contemplated. And the thought of my great-grandmother lying amongst broken glass on her kitchen floor, nursing a smashed hip and a bruised face, scratching at the carpet and defecating on her own muumuu was too awful for my pre-pubescent brain to handle. In that moment, I vowed that I would die the day after my 70th birthday. Or even sooner, if possible. I would never be found covered in my own shit and lying broken on the floor, because I simply wouldn’t live that long. I would die while I still had dignity and presence of mind. Hopefully I would still have my figure too.

And so, when my time came, I said “Yes!” to cigarettes. I said yes to alcohol and pot and pills and anything else that crossed my path. I still work out and eat properly and moisturise and sleep 8 hours every night, because I am vain, but I’m not going to make any effort to extend my life beyond the ability to control my own bladder. If being healthy means dying in a puddle of my own excrement with broken hips, then Harold can eat my arse.

Editor’s note: Any teachers or parents who are interested in having Annik speak at their children’s schools can send an expression of interest via email to education [at] annikskelton.com

My mother corners me in the kitchen and says “You’ll never believe what just happened!”

Certain that she is right as my imagination could never conjure up something as spectacularly mudane as what she’s about to share, I smile politely.

“So I was emailing Kerry, and thinking about calling her, but I thought I’d wait until after lunch. But then the phone rang and, no shit, it was Kerry! We were just chatting, then after a while, she said ‘Why did you call me?’ and I said ‘Kerry, you called me.‘ And she said ‘No, I didn’t,’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did!’ Anyway, we finally figured out that while Kerry was cooking, she got a message on her answering machine that sounded just like me, and that’s why she was asking why I had called her!”

Silence.

“Because she got a voice message on her answering machine!”

Crickets.

“Because it sounded just like me!”

By which point, I’ve usually left the room to slit my wrists.

My grandmother was a pretty cool lady. She made an excellent batch of honey jumbles and was the first person to nip outside whenever one of my aunts lit up a joint. Even though we shared the same name, I never spent enough time with her, but she wrote her memoirs before she died and reading them helped explain a lot about my own life.

Last year, Nanna got sick with various forms of cancer and shifted permanently into my aunt’s lounge room while she waited for the inevitable. I flew up to Brisbane to visit her and found my namesake sunken in an armchair, even thinner than usual and looking overly pale.

“How are you feeling about everything?” I asked, as I painted her nails a deep red.

“Okay, I guess,” she shrugged, “I’ve said goodbye to all my children, divvied up my stuff and had a good run. All I can do now is wait.”

“It’s a bit horrible though,” I pointed out, “Just waiting to die.”

“Nah, it happens to everyone,” Nanna replied, “Besides, I’m sick of hearing about the bloody American election.”

My father treats a lot of old folk in nursing homes around the Hills, and they are all nuts. Based on the anecdotes he shares about these visits, I am definitely going to stuff him and Mum into a home the moment one of them loses their glasses and then finds them on top of their head.

Some snippets:

• At a certain Christmas Carols charity concert one year, a mature lady did not feel she was being given enough attention as everyone was looking towards the performers on stage and not at her. In an admirable effort, she stripped down to her birthday suit and strutted up and down the aisle of the nursing home’s dining hall while waving her arms above her head. Obeying instructions from staff to ignore this particularly attention-seeking patient, the other geriatrics simply stared ahead and continued to watch the carols. Undeterred, the naked lady walked to the side of the stage and unplugged all the speakers, then climbed on top of one of them and began singing her own carols.

• One blind patient was admitted after she fell and broke a hip while frantically going through her house searching for her missing husband. When the paramedics were called to attend to the blind lady, they discovered her husband hiding in a wardrobe, giggling at his visually-impaired wife’s inability to win Hide and Seek. In an apparent attempt to make amends, the husband would visit his blind wife at the Home for lunch every day. The nurse would place a plate in front of each of them and explain to the blind lady, “Your peas are at twelve o’clock, your potatoes are at three o’clock, your ham is at six o’clock and your carrots are at nine o’clock.” The old man would smile at the nurse, wait for her to leave, and then reach over and spin his wife’s plate forty-five degrees.

• Foolishly, I accompanied my father on a call to a nursing home when I was about eleven. Bored and wandering the halls, I got talking to an old bird who pulled me into her room with the promise of a gift. As I silently assessed my nearest emergency exits, she shuffled around her kitchen opening and closing cupboards and muttering to herself. “Why don’t you let me go and we’ll just call it square?” I suggested, but she had apparently found what she was looking for and pressed an apple and a pear into my hands. ”I got these for you,” she lied as I backed away. Out in the hall, I shoved them into the nearest fruit bowl and then made my father take me home.

• Another lady ate all her blankets, then bitched about being cold at night and having a sore tummy.